Horse's Suicide Attempts, take one, two, and three.

To prepare you for the upcoming post of Horse's fourth suicide attempt (by far her most creative), I'm going to step back in time a little bit.

Let me start by saying I don't know why these animals find me or are born into my ownership, but everything I own is just this way of sane. Quirky, odd, strange. They have different ways of looking at the world from others, and maybe that's what attracts me to them. (Or maybe, just maybe, I'm tilted in the same way.. But I'm sure that's not true because every teenaged girl wants to live in a camper without hot water, right? Yes??)

Anyway, Horse is no different. Granted, her psychosis is slightly different from my other two brats lovelies (Pony and Barbie). Horse lacks the basic desire to stay out of small spaces or keep her mouth to herself. She also solves every equation by jumping or rearing (see post on turn-on-the-forehand....). She is insanely curious about EVERYTHING, to a fault, and has a fondness for watching small furry animals run from her.

She also likes putting herself in dangerous situations. Keep reading...

SUICIDE ATTEMPT ONE, six months old.
We, like most barns, do 24/7 turnout. So in each paddock, we have giant water tanks. Typical, normal. Horse found them fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that one day she fell into one. I am not totally sure how she did it, but it has become family lore. My dad had been walking out of the barn when he saw her donkey-like ears protruding over the lip of the tank. He screamed for my mom and rushed to rescue the drowning baby Horse.

She wasn't scared or even really drowning though. He said she looked up at him like, oh hey, I'm in a water tank. He tipped it over, and she scrambled out.

SUICIDE ATTEMPT TWO, age three.
Some stall fronts have a "V" cutout so you can feed grain, and the barn where she got started had these.

Horse jumped out of it or tried to. She got hung right behind her girth. The cowboy said it was the scariest thing he'd ever seen in thirty years of horses: My baby, hanging half-way in her stall with so much pressure on her ribs she was having trouble breathing. He had crawled under her front legs and pushed her back into the stall.

It took a month before the swelling went down. She had been there four days and had only been walking. We did not send her away again.

SUICIDE ATTEMPT 3, age four.
The hardest rain storm of the year. I caught her and stuffed her in a stall. Her body was quivering all over. I remember it vividly.

The wind caught the top of her Dutch door and flung it open, but it wasn't until the rain picked up even more that she freaked. She'd never been inside in a storm and was not fond of stalls anyway. I remember screaming as she bumped into the bottom half of the door, screaming and sloshing into the rain to shut the top half.

I was too late. I was, however, in time to see everything that follows. The angle she jumped from was so off she caught the bottom door with her hind leg, swinging it under the middle of her chest. She slammed, full weight, against the door. It broke off its hinges, and she stumbled in the muck beyond the door. Limping, pronounced.

She had just healed from that when we both came to live at More Inside Leg.
You would think that she would have learned.

-- Girl